some books i read lately (february edition)
this looks like i read a lot, but most of these are very short and also very low-effort, because i was kinda shit in january ngl
Top Elf by Caleb Zane Huett
After reading that big pile of nonfiction back in November/December, I wanted something light and bright and cutesy, a fictive palate-cleanser. And, hey, this one was Christmas-themed to boot!
tl;dr: It's a kid's book. It's a cute kid's book. If I had a kiddo in my life I would give this book to them. There are awful puns that I laughed a lot at, and there is lots of charming SCIENCE because one of the elves is a wonderful Christmas-science nerd, and there was even a potshot at Ayn Rand so good times all around.
I'll confess I bought this book almost entirely because I fucking adore the podcast that the author does with a friend, but hey, there are worse reasons to buy things, and I had a fun time :)
The Lies that Bind by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Meh.
I feel a bit badly that I don't like Appiah's books more; he seems like a lovely dude. But, as with his other book Cosmopolitanism, my regret is that he doesn't push far enough. He tells us about how race is more complicated than we think. He tells us how gender is more complicated than we think. He tells us how class is more complicated than we think (and also, weirdly, he does his own take on the Veil of Ignorance argument). It's not an unpleasant read; it's full of interesting anecdotes illustrating all of these fuzzy distinctions (the aforelinked bit on Amo Afer was great, the story of Michael Young's life, beyond merely "the guy who invented the term meritocracy", was great, etc). But it didn't leave me with answers to questions like: how much should identities bind us? how do we determine when an identity is being useful or not? and so on, except near the end, where he adopts the notion of treating "identity" as a sort of additive, liberatory thing-i.e., one should not feel pressured to be a "southerner" vs a "west coaster", or "femme" vs "nonbinary", or "American" vs "immigrant" or whatever, but should instead celebrate a self-conception that mingles all these together in a proud, glorious mess. "I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me." I'm intrigued but he didn't finish the job.
Props for his, uh, particularly spicy tackling of the whole cultural appropriation issue. "Accusing people of cultural appropriation means you're endorsing the TPP" is a take I did not expect in the middle of this otherwise mild book.
Art and Fear by Bayles & Orland
Ordinarily I'm not super into Books About Writing or Books About Artmaking, because they seem to focus on the most elementary or mundane things over and over. But this book came so strongly recommended I gave it a try.
I liked this book immensely, particularly its focus on habit and practicality-not just generic advice like "write every day," but musings on how to hit stuff like a daily mark more consistently, what communities and practices better foster artistic growth, and so on. And it's written in the kind of tone that I, as a fundamentally squishy and dreamy person, most appreciate-while never denying that artmaking is hard, that going at it without the support of a community and with all the built-in precarity and uncertainty that comes with it is hard, the book pushes you to find a way. There's urgency here but it's because your work is at stake and it's up to you to make it happen. (Contrast against the more yell-y "GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER" style of advice that tends to be in vogue these days. I'm concerned enough about artmaking for its own sake; all I need is someone to acknowledge how serious that is, without the extra yelling.)
I also liked their description of how you acquire style, generally. While I've never worried overmuch about finding my "style", this seems to be a preoccupation particularly among young visual artists, and they should probably just have this whole passage in boldface over their desk.
Everything past the first section repeats itself too much, but the first section is gold, and rather short, so give it a read if you've got a chance.
a giant pile of so-so AtlA slashfic
[when i am chronically sleep deprived] i tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
I commented a long time ago about the "50's style of scifi writing"-where there's an emphasis on so-called transparent prose, sparse but specific details, no flashy stylistic tricks, and so on.
The thing about these stories is that they often feel devoid feeling for me, in an important way. I totally get why some people care more about technobabble than squishy stream-of-consciousness nonsense, and why people were so into the arm's-length emotionality of, say, "The Cold Equations," but I just don't like it personally.
Chiang, in what I've read of him, seems a clear inheritor of this tradition. He's not out here doing bombast or crazy stylistic tricks, and his characters are often forgettable, because they're not the point. He takes an interesting thought-experiment, finds a narrative for it, and puts it to the page in as clear and clean a way as he knows how.
However, sometimes what Chiang's doing really works for me. For instance, "The Story of Your Life" absolutely slays me each time, and it's because he chose such a powerful framing narrator for the story. Of course the narrator's a little detached, of course the narrator's a little dry; she's an over-intellectual academic. But even so, her raw feeling for her daughter, her husband, for everyone can't help but emanate through even her very restrained, balanced prose. And so I can quote the opening paragraph of the story from memory, and quote it at random people all the time, because it's so powerful, and the power grows each time I reread the story:
Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it’s near midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we’re slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomethings swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don’t feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, “Do you want to make a baby?”
I hadn't read Chiang in a while, and was surprised to learn that he wrote a novella, so I picked The Lifecycle of Software Objects up.
And this novella almost works for me. The material is super-interesting (humans raising AIs, but instead of the AIs becoming superintelligent destructive monsters, the AIs are more like disabled kids, needing special attention but getting shafted by society), and Chiang brings in a bunch of interesting angles on the core conceit. The natural comparison to stuff like Second Life, which formed such devoted communities around such a surface-level-trivial thing, gives you all kinds of spooky-tingling feelings while reading.
And while you feel for the AIs, the story seems to be loosely built around the relationship between Ana and Derek, and that aspect just didn't do a ton for me. That, plus the fact that the ending seemed a little forced, means it fell just short of hitting the same mark that "The Story of Your Life" did for me.
Not a bad read by any means, though, if you're intrigued by whatever summary you read.
Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai
Picked this up on a rec by
missxylia and boy I'm glad I did.
This whole book is a testament to the sheer beauty and vibrancy of a liberated mind. The protagonist is a schoolgirl, and thus powerless and restricted in the way all schoolchildren are-you have parents telling you to do shit, and you have a school you have to go to, and chores you have to do, and a place you have to live, no matter how you feel about it. But she is utterly free to think whatever she likes, and she thinks about everything. Big questions, which she wrestles with in a way that belongs to her and no one else. Small annoyances, which sting with just how rude and relatable they are (e.g. her true feelings on a school-friend, who she doesn't even like but humors anyway). And she changes her mind over and over-she is trying to be a "good girl"; she's really an awful girl; but she tries to be good sometimes; she doesn't want to be good; she can't decide (and really, how often do any of us ever finally decide anything?). Over the course of a single day (!!!), she thinks the most unpardonable and daring and petty and profound and mundane things, ponders duty and suicide and creepy old men and a blind cousin and what it must be like to be her mom and so much more; I can hardly believe the book's as thin as it is.
There's some similarity here to Virginia Woolf-both of these authors are interested in getting as close to the mind itself as possible. But whereas Woolf is trying to pull you in, trancelike, to some Glorious Artistic Whole, the point where a hundred different minds converge-well, Dazai just hones in on one mind, and he has a razor-keen insight into just how much stuff we think about on a daily basis, and from there he merely brings it all into the same sharp, equal focus. The resulting assemblage is both maddening and illuminating-but first-and-foremost it feels real in the same sharp way an Ansel Adams photo feels real. (The photographer comparison is really sticking to me, here.)
This book is watching the process of becoming. Not becoming anything in particular-I've no idea what the protagonist will be like when she grows up-just becoming. I mean, I think everyone is becoming all the time. But young girls are especially so, and it's an exhilarating thing to experience.
This slim little novella made me want to think more freely and powerfully myself, and that's as great a gift as anything a book could give.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
An odd-but-charming little book. The author uses the color blue as a jumping-off point for musing about a broad swath of topics: failed relationships, how the science of color works, anecdotes about the Sar-e-Sang mines (where lapis lazuli is found) and Newton's experiments with light, musings on loneliness, and so on. I have often wondered what a successful "prose-poem" would look like, and, well, here is one. It's slight enough to be read in a couple hours, so if the concept intrigues you, may as well pick it up at a library.
I found one review that compared it to Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, in the sense that both are composed of little aphorisms and anecdotes, and I find this comparison delightful. How a mopey 1800s continentalist philosopher stands in dialogue with a hippie 2000s MFA prof is an exercise left to the reader.
Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward
This is actually just three essays bound up into one book. There's decent tips for writing-people-who-are-unlike-yourself, but didn't find much here that was new to me. Possibly useful for beginning writers; turns out a lot of the advice for writing-people-who-are-unlike-yourself is identical to just plain good writing advice.
Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek
WOAH I ALMOST FORGOT I READ THIS ONE.
This book seems to have been written somewhat as a reaction to the Bloomberg articles that hype up the notion of a "gig economy" and see the development of high-tech platforms as some radical reshaping of the economy. Srnicek argues that this new "platform capitalism" is not a new thing at all, but a predictable result of past trends.
Chapters 1 and 2 give a concise overview of the three major economic events of the past half-century: the 1970s economic downturn (which prompted corporations to bust unions and cut back like mad, to try and remain competitive), the 1990s tech boom (in which we laid down a fuckton of fiber and other internet infrastructure via a mixture of government policy and VC funding, which led to a short-term boom/bust but yielded further ground for long-term later developments), and the response to the 2008 financial crisis (in which we cut interest rates like mad, which seems mostly good, except it reduces incentives to invest, and since it's already so easy for tech companies to hoard money overseas relative to other industries, since they can just #yolo license their software wherever, they end up squatting on huge piles of cash).
Chapter 3 is where Srnicek describes two kinds of "platforms", what he describes as "lean platforms" and what I'll call "monoliths." Lean platforms are things like Uber and TaskRabbit-companies that operate by owning as little capital as possible and employing as few people as possible. The conditions that have allowed these companies to thrive, Srnicek argues, are somewhat anomalous (low interest rates, favorable environment for VC investment, etc), and seem likely to implode the second the winds of monetary policy shift-even though Uber doesn't employ the vast majority of their workers, they still can't manage to turn a profit. Thus (the argument goes), if Uber's gonna survive, it'll either turn into a luxury service (i.e. start charging what it'd actually take to earn a profit) or have to transform its business model (i.e. become a self-driving car company, and then it actually owns some capital, etc).
The platform monoliths, on the other hand, are any big players whose business is amplified by having access to big data. Google and ads is the obvious case, as is Amazon and retail. Big Agriculture and whatever the fuck Monsanto's doing is less-obvious but perfectly legit. These companies have to compete for data if they want to stay competitive in the marketplace-data, Srnicek asserts, is a bit like the crude oil of our time-a resource that companies can "refine" to extract value/profits. Consequence: this means companies are going to keep trampling all over "data privacy" notions as long as they can, because the capitalist imperative. Consequence: data uniquely benefits from network effects, e.g. I join Facebook because all my friends are already there, which means this data shit amplifies capitalism's already-strong tendency toward forming monopolies.
I... wow, summarizing nonfiction takes forever.
Anyway, this is a pretty slim volume, and I am not an economist so my knowledge of this shit is kinda sketchy, but it was a pleasant read. The discussion of how interest rates and various federal monetary policy things had such crazy ripple effects all throughout the economy in the 1970s downturn + 1990s bubble + 2008 crisis were super-interesting. Comparisons of Uber/Lyft drivers to the much older "farm laborer" type of work, where you show up at the farm one morning and hope they've got some work they want to pay you for that day, were interesting. (Also I think the term "hyper-exploitation" should become more common just so we can describe what we, as like, a world society, are doing to certain sectors of employment.) I'm actually somewhat unpersuaded that all the lean platforms must either Go Big, Go Lux, or Go Bust (I've heard arguments that e.g. Uber could be profitable tomorrow if it just stopped investing in growth, though I haven't looked at the term sheets-at the very least it seems like there should be a state where you are "lean enough" to be actually profitable), but the brief glimpse into how data is transforming not just my industry but every industry was... interesting.
anyway yeah that's my armchair economics of the day
Kitchen Table Tarot by Melissa Cynova
If I were learning tarot from scratch today I'd definitely pick this book. Heck, even though I'm well-acquainted with tarot, this book was a fun, quick read for reviewing the basics-the delightful, down-to-earth, slightly cheeky tone makes the same-old same-old feel new and fresh.
Top Elf by Caleb Zane Huett
After reading that big pile of nonfiction back in November/December, I wanted something light and bright and cutesy, a fictive palate-cleanser. And, hey, this one was Christmas-themed to boot!
tl;dr: It's a kid's book. It's a cute kid's book. If I had a kiddo in my life I would give this book to them. There are awful puns that I laughed a lot at, and there is lots of charming SCIENCE because one of the elves is a wonderful Christmas-science nerd, and there was even a potshot at Ayn Rand so good times all around.
I'll confess I bought this book almost entirely because I fucking adore the podcast that the author does with a friend, but hey, there are worse reasons to buy things, and I had a fun time :)
The Lies that Bind by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Meh.
I feel a bit badly that I don't like Appiah's books more; he seems like a lovely dude. But, as with his other book Cosmopolitanism, my regret is that he doesn't push far enough. He tells us about how race is more complicated than we think. He tells us how gender is more complicated than we think. He tells us how class is more complicated than we think (and also, weirdly, he does his own take on the Veil of Ignorance argument). It's not an unpleasant read; it's full of interesting anecdotes illustrating all of these fuzzy distinctions (the aforelinked bit on Amo Afer was great, the story of Michael Young's life, beyond merely "the guy who invented the term meritocracy", was great, etc). But it didn't leave me with answers to questions like: how much should identities bind us? how do we determine when an identity is being useful or not? and so on, except near the end, where he adopts the notion of treating "identity" as a sort of additive, liberatory thing-i.e., one should not feel pressured to be a "southerner" vs a "west coaster", or "femme" vs "nonbinary", or "American" vs "immigrant" or whatever, but should instead celebrate a self-conception that mingles all these together in a proud, glorious mess. "I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me." I'm intrigued but he didn't finish the job.
Props for his, uh, particularly spicy tackling of the whole cultural appropriation issue. "Accusing people of cultural appropriation means you're endorsing the TPP" is a take I did not expect in the middle of this otherwise mild book.
Art and Fear by Bayles & Orland
Ordinarily I'm not super into Books About Writing or Books About Artmaking, because they seem to focus on the most elementary or mundane things over and over. But this book came so strongly recommended I gave it a try.
I liked this book immensely, particularly its focus on habit and practicality-not just generic advice like "write every day," but musings on how to hit stuff like a daily mark more consistently, what communities and practices better foster artistic growth, and so on. And it's written in the kind of tone that I, as a fundamentally squishy and dreamy person, most appreciate-while never denying that artmaking is hard, that going at it without the support of a community and with all the built-in precarity and uncertainty that comes with it is hard, the book pushes you to find a way. There's urgency here but it's because your work is at stake and it's up to you to make it happen. (Contrast against the more yell-y "GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER" style of advice that tends to be in vogue these days. I'm concerned enough about artmaking for its own sake; all I need is someone to acknowledge how serious that is, without the extra yelling.)
I also liked their description of how you acquire style, generally. While I've never worried overmuch about finding my "style", this seems to be a preoccupation particularly among young visual artists, and they should probably just have this whole passage in boldface over their desk.
Everything past the first section repeats itself too much, but the first section is gold, and rather short, so give it a read if you've got a chance.
a giant pile of so-so AtlA slashfic
[when i am chronically sleep deprived] i tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
I commented a long time ago about the "50's style of scifi writing"-where there's an emphasis on so-called transparent prose, sparse but specific details, no flashy stylistic tricks, and so on.
The thing about these stories is that they often feel devoid feeling for me, in an important way. I totally get why some people care more about technobabble than squishy stream-of-consciousness nonsense, and why people were so into the arm's-length emotionality of, say, "The Cold Equations," but I just don't like it personally.
Chiang, in what I've read of him, seems a clear inheritor of this tradition. He's not out here doing bombast or crazy stylistic tricks, and his characters are often forgettable, because they're not the point. He takes an interesting thought-experiment, finds a narrative for it, and puts it to the page in as clear and clean a way as he knows how.
However, sometimes what Chiang's doing really works for me. For instance, "The Story of Your Life" absolutely slays me each time, and it's because he chose such a powerful framing narrator for the story. Of course the narrator's a little detached, of course the narrator's a little dry; she's an over-intellectual academic. But even so, her raw feeling for her daughter, her husband, for everyone can't help but emanate through even her very restrained, balanced prose. And so I can quote the opening paragraph of the story from memory, and quote it at random people all the time, because it's so powerful, and the power grows each time I reread the story:
Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it’s near midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we’re slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomethings swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don’t feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, “Do you want to make a baby?”
I hadn't read Chiang in a while, and was surprised to learn that he wrote a novella, so I picked The Lifecycle of Software Objects up.
And this novella almost works for me. The material is super-interesting (humans raising AIs, but instead of the AIs becoming superintelligent destructive monsters, the AIs are more like disabled kids, needing special attention but getting shafted by society), and Chiang brings in a bunch of interesting angles on the core conceit. The natural comparison to stuff like Second Life, which formed such devoted communities around such a surface-level-trivial thing, gives you all kinds of spooky-tingling feelings while reading.
And while you feel for the AIs, the story seems to be loosely built around the relationship between Ana and Derek, and that aspect just didn't do a ton for me. That, plus the fact that the ending seemed a little forced, means it fell just short of hitting the same mark that "The Story of Your Life" did for me.
Not a bad read by any means, though, if you're intrigued by whatever summary you read.
Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai
Picked this up on a rec by
missxylia and boy I'm glad I did.
This whole book is a testament to the sheer beauty and vibrancy of a liberated mind. The protagonist is a schoolgirl, and thus powerless and restricted in the way all schoolchildren are-you have parents telling you to do shit, and you have a school you have to go to, and chores you have to do, and a place you have to live, no matter how you feel about it. But she is utterly free to think whatever she likes, and she thinks about everything. Big questions, which she wrestles with in a way that belongs to her and no one else. Small annoyances, which sting with just how rude and relatable they are (e.g. her true feelings on a school-friend, who she doesn't even like but humors anyway). And she changes her mind over and over-she is trying to be a "good girl"; she's really an awful girl; but she tries to be good sometimes; she doesn't want to be good; she can't decide (and really, how often do any of us ever finally decide anything?). Over the course of a single day (!!!), she thinks the most unpardonable and daring and petty and profound and mundane things, ponders duty and suicide and creepy old men and a blind cousin and what it must be like to be her mom and so much more; I can hardly believe the book's as thin as it is.
There's some similarity here to Virginia Woolf-both of these authors are interested in getting as close to the mind itself as possible. But whereas Woolf is trying to pull you in, trancelike, to some Glorious Artistic Whole, the point where a hundred different minds converge-well, Dazai just hones in on one mind, and he has a razor-keen insight into just how much stuff we think about on a daily basis, and from there he merely brings it all into the same sharp, equal focus. The resulting assemblage is both maddening and illuminating-but first-and-foremost it feels real in the same sharp way an Ansel Adams photo feels real. (The photographer comparison is really sticking to me, here.)
This book is watching the process of becoming. Not becoming anything in particular-I've no idea what the protagonist will be like when she grows up-just becoming. I mean, I think everyone is becoming all the time. But young girls are especially so, and it's an exhilarating thing to experience.
This slim little novella made me want to think more freely and powerfully myself, and that's as great a gift as anything a book could give.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
An odd-but-charming little book. The author uses the color blue as a jumping-off point for musing about a broad swath of topics: failed relationships, how the science of color works, anecdotes about the Sar-e-Sang mines (where lapis lazuli is found) and Newton's experiments with light, musings on loneliness, and so on. I have often wondered what a successful "prose-poem" would look like, and, well, here is one. It's slight enough to be read in a couple hours, so if the concept intrigues you, may as well pick it up at a library.
I found one review that compared it to Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, in the sense that both are composed of little aphorisms and anecdotes, and I find this comparison delightful. How a mopey 1800s continentalist philosopher stands in dialogue with a hippie 2000s MFA prof is an exercise left to the reader.
Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward
This is actually just three essays bound up into one book. There's decent tips for writing-people-who-are-unlike-yourself, but didn't find much here that was new to me. Possibly useful for beginning writers; turns out a lot of the advice for writing-people-who-are-unlike-yourself is identical to just plain good writing advice.
Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek
WOAH I ALMOST FORGOT I READ THIS ONE.
This book seems to have been written somewhat as a reaction to the Bloomberg articles that hype up the notion of a "gig economy" and see the development of high-tech platforms as some radical reshaping of the economy. Srnicek argues that this new "platform capitalism" is not a new thing at all, but a predictable result of past trends.
Chapters 1 and 2 give a concise overview of the three major economic events of the past half-century: the 1970s economic downturn (which prompted corporations to bust unions and cut back like mad, to try and remain competitive), the 1990s tech boom (in which we laid down a fuckton of fiber and other internet infrastructure via a mixture of government policy and VC funding, which led to a short-term boom/bust but yielded further ground for long-term later developments), and the response to the 2008 financial crisis (in which we cut interest rates like mad, which seems mostly good, except it reduces incentives to invest, and since it's already so easy for tech companies to hoard money overseas relative to other industries, since they can just #yolo license their software wherever, they end up squatting on huge piles of cash).
Chapter 3 is where Srnicek describes two kinds of "platforms", what he describes as "lean platforms" and what I'll call "monoliths." Lean platforms are things like Uber and TaskRabbit-companies that operate by owning as little capital as possible and employing as few people as possible. The conditions that have allowed these companies to thrive, Srnicek argues, are somewhat anomalous (low interest rates, favorable environment for VC investment, etc), and seem likely to implode the second the winds of monetary policy shift-even though Uber doesn't employ the vast majority of their workers, they still can't manage to turn a profit. Thus (the argument goes), if Uber's gonna survive, it'll either turn into a luxury service (i.e. start charging what it'd actually take to earn a profit) or have to transform its business model (i.e. become a self-driving car company, and then it actually owns some capital, etc).
The platform monoliths, on the other hand, are any big players whose business is amplified by having access to big data. Google and ads is the obvious case, as is Amazon and retail. Big Agriculture and whatever the fuck Monsanto's doing is less-obvious but perfectly legit. These companies have to compete for data if they want to stay competitive in the marketplace-data, Srnicek asserts, is a bit like the crude oil of our time-a resource that companies can "refine" to extract value/profits. Consequence: this means companies are going to keep trampling all over "data privacy" notions as long as they can, because the capitalist imperative. Consequence: data uniquely benefits from network effects, e.g. I join Facebook because all my friends are already there, which means this data shit amplifies capitalism's already-strong tendency toward forming monopolies.
I... wow, summarizing nonfiction takes forever.
Anyway, this is a pretty slim volume, and I am not an economist so my knowledge of this shit is kinda sketchy, but it was a pleasant read. The discussion of how interest rates and various federal monetary policy things had such crazy ripple effects all throughout the economy in the 1970s downturn + 1990s bubble + 2008 crisis were super-interesting. Comparisons of Uber/Lyft drivers to the much older "farm laborer" type of work, where you show up at the farm one morning and hope they've got some work they want to pay you for that day, were interesting. (Also I think the term "hyper-exploitation" should become more common just so we can describe what we, as like, a world society, are doing to certain sectors of employment.) I'm actually somewhat unpersuaded that all the lean platforms must either Go Big, Go Lux, or Go Bust (I've heard arguments that e.g. Uber could be profitable tomorrow if it just stopped investing in growth, though I haven't looked at the term sheets-at the very least it seems like there should be a state where you are "lean enough" to be actually profitable), but the brief glimpse into how data is transforming not just my industry but every industry was... interesting.
anyway yeah that's my armchair economics of the day
Kitchen Table Tarot by Melissa Cynova
If I were learning tarot from scratch today I'd definitely pick this book. Heck, even though I'm well-acquainted with tarot, this book was a fun, quick read for reviewing the basics-the delightful, down-to-earth, slightly cheeky tone makes the same-old same-old feel new and fresh.